If you think that the mods have screwed up and improperly removed your submission, feel free to message us. But your message must include a link to the removed submission and an accounting of what rules you're sure that you followed. Please DO NOT message us stating that you followed all of the rules. That pretty much tells us that you have read this rule page. Tell us how you followed the rules.

Do NOT, under ANY circumstance delete your submission. If for some reason you'd like your submission removed, please message the moderators and request that they remove or lock your submission. You can read about how removals and deletions work on our FAQ page.

Follow Reddit's site wide spam and self promotion rules

"If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content/affiliate links, you're almost certainly a spammer"

"It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account."

"You should not just start submitting your links"

"You should submit from a variety of sources"

For more information about how the 10% rule works please see this wiki page. For more information about why the moderators made the choices they did in responding to the 10% issue, please see this Q & A post.

Note:

Even if you are not self promoting, if over 10% of your submissions are from a specific site, or about a specific thing, you are still considered to be violating this rule.

Deleting older posts is NOT an acceptable way to attempt to get around the 10% rule. If too many of your posts have been deleted, this can count against you even if you are not in violation of 10%. Also deleting a post from this subreddit is against subreddit rules. DO NOT do it.

Subreddit specific self promotion rules

What is self promotion? Posting anything that you are a part of. Promoting a game that you're a dev on, posting a link to your own blog or article or review (or a write up by someone else about your game), linking to your crowdfunding campaign or youtube channel; these are all forms of self promotion. In order to help us separate self promotion from spam, ALL self promotion posts must follow the following rules.

1. Ensure minimal account requirements to promote your work:

account must be a minimum of 90 days old

the account must show activity during that time

account must not violate the reddit 10% rule globally (not just /r/indiegaming, but over all of reddit)

Every time you make a submission, a bot will check to see if you're violating the 10% rule. If you are, you'll likely be both banned from /r/IndieGaming and banned from all of reddit as well. If your primary purpose for posting on reddit is promotion, please use reddit's advertising system instead.

2. Do not hide self promotion

Do NOT hide your connection to a game / vlog / kickstarter / etc. Doing so is grounds for domain, channel and content bans. Likewise, do not avoid a ban with an alternate account. This too is grounds for a more serious type of ban. We're generally understanding folks, and often willing to give second chances. If you learn from your mistakes, and approach us demonstrating this, you may very well earn an unban.

If you do start a new account (for whatever reason, but especially in cases where your first account was banned by the admins or by the modertors), message the mods and let us know.

3. NO LINK POSTS; Meaningful text-posts only for your work

There are two options when submitting to most subs. You can submit a link, or you can submit a text post, also known as a self post.

We do NOT allow link submissions for self promotion. You MUST make a text post which should do the following:

Identify yourself as involved in the project and specify your role / identify yourself as the author or the blog, article, vlog, etc.

Start a discussion - talk about the development process, or ask for feedback, offer to answer questions, talk a little about why your wrote this blog/article, etc.

If you are promoting a game, tell us why we should love your stuff, don't just copy your game's description and bulletpoints. Here is a great example of a high quality self post.

Please keep in mind that self-posts still count towards the 10% rule.

4. Properly title your post

In addition to following the submission rules on having a title with context, any self-promotion — whether you're a dev promoting a game, or a blogger signal boosting an article — must be tagged with the following: [SP - kind]. Replace "kind" with whatever you are promoting (blog, game, kickstarter, youtube channel, etc). What you're promoting is not necessarily the form of the link.

As an example, let's take three people, all of whom are linking to an article. One person is a writer, one person runs a blog and one person is a game dev.

The writer of the article would add "[SP - article]" to the title. The game dev who links an article about their game would add "[SP - game]" to the title. And the person who runs the gaming blog that this article was posted to would add "[SP - blog]".

5. Participate in your submissions

You can't just post and be done with it. You should be active on the thread for your post, answering questions, replying to feedback, etc.

6. Limited crowdfunding posts

In addition to following all of the other spam rules, crowdfunding requests are limited. You may post announcements, milestones, or last day posts.

Short campaigns: If the campaign runs for less than a month, the dev team may make one post total.

Long campaigns: If the campaign runs for over one month, the dev team may make two posts total.

These rules apply to the entire development team. The idea is that if your crowdfunding campaign is successful, fans will talk about it as well. Crowdfunding rules for non-devs, and some additional guidelines here.

7. AMAs, giveaways/contests and surveys must be cleared with the mods beforehand

If you're interested in doing an AMA please message the moderators and let them know who you are, why you want to do an AMA and roughly when you'd like to do it.

If you're interested in posting a survey, please message the moderators and let them know who you are, what the survey is for, who the survey is aimed at and what sorts of questions are asked. Also, please give us information on your privacy policy, who has access to the data and where interested parties can sign up to be notified of the results.

If you're interested in having a giveaway, please message the moderators and let them know what you are planning to give, how many and if you're doing this as a contest, what form the contest will take. Please don't bother asking if you don't fit the minimum account requirements or if you're over 10%. You will still need to follow all self promotion rules.

Giveaways may be done without prior mod approval on the weekly sticky.

8. Use our self promotion sticky

We host weekly self promotion stickies. These have no account age limit, so you can use them even if you're a new redditor. These also don't have the limits on fundraising pleas, so this is a good place for kickstarter reminders. These threads are also good for minor updates, more frequent devlogs, requests for feedback and the like.

Our weekly self promotion stickies are automatically posted by the AutoModerator every Monday at 5am EST and run for a week. They use contest mode, which means that only top level comments are shown and that the comments are in a different order each time you look at the thread. So if you post later in the week, you won't get buried.

Each top level comment basically functions as it's own mini post. All top level comments in the weekly thread must be self promotion, and the replies to each top level comment should be in response to whatever is being promoted.

Like with self promotion posts, you shouldn't just copy paste over the description or bullet points of the game, instead tell us why you think we'd like it. Be descriptive, be interesting. And like with self promo posts, please participate in any discussion your comment generates.

9. Make linked media accessible

For video and audio, this means NO auto-play links, and providing captioning (closed or open) or a transcript. Auto-captioning does not count, as most of the time, it's unusable. u/webcaptioningdescribes auto-captioning quality as if "someone thought their video was being translated into Spanish but instead the translator they hired just added the letter 'o' to the end of some words and accent marks here and there." Seriously, it's prettyterrible. If captioning is not useable, then the video is not accessible.

If you do not wish to follow these rules, try advertising through reddit instead

If you do not follow our subreddit rules, you'll be banned from /r/IndieGaming. If you do not follow Reddit's site-wide rules, you'll likely have your account banned from all of reddit. If you're just interested in advertising, you should use the reddit self serve advertisement system to target your ad to wherever you like.